Denis Walsh: There’s still time to tune up misfiring unit

Ireland tried to force attacking plays from less than ideal positions and couldn’t pull them off. Unforced errors spread through the team like a virus

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t some time over the next couple of days the hand-wringing and the name-calling will subside, the hysterical commentary will have blown over and the Irish management will start picking up the pieces of a Humpty Dumpty performance.

Unlike the hapless creature in the nursery rhyme, though, this is not irreparable. There are big issues to address but none that can’t be addressed. Is there any comfort in that? There must be.

Put it like this: it was so bad that the remedies are staring everybody in the face. Ireland’s performance wasn’t inexplicably bad: the explanations were available long before the game finished. Within minutes of the final whistle, captain Brian O’Driscoll and coach Declan Kidney were able to articulate why this performance had broken down.

There will be devil in the detail, of course, and every second of the match will be logged and coded and parsed by the